World's End

The Sandman

by Neil Gaiman

A pair of co-workers driving late at night and things start to go strange. Snow starts falling- in June? Then something strange runs across the road, the driver veers aside and the car crashes. Struggling through the snowstorm with his injured passenger, quickly disorientated and lost. The two find haven in a large inn that is full of strange customers also waiting out the storm. Folk who look like elves and centaurs, as well as normal humans, but all hail from different worlds. Apparently the storm raging has affected reality, so they were all misdirected to this inn. To pass the time they tells stories, varied and curious. Some even have other stories contained within them.

There are stories of voyages and adventures, of misdeeds and politicking, of people who deal closely with death, and others who have the most ordinary humdrum lives (with little to tell). One is of a woman masquerading as a man. My favorite was the story of the dreaming city, even though I'm not really fond of cityscapes myself. The Sandman, or sometimes his sister Death, make the briefest of appearances on these pages. And I'm still puzzling about what the procession was they all viewed at the end- was it for Orpheus' death? I guess I might find out in the next volume...

Rating: 3/5 ........ 168 pages, 1994